Absorbing Knowledge from and with External Partners: The Role of Social Integration Mechanisms

Dynamic capabilities that enable innovation are crucial to survival and success in today’s highly competitive business environment, because they enable organizational adaptation, transformation, and seizing of opportunities. Absorptive capacity is an important dynamic capability that enables organizations to leverage external knowledge for innovation purposes. In this theory-building paper, we address the fundamental research question of how organizations can leverage external partners as external sources of knowledge. We offer three primary contributions to the literature on managerial decision-making. First, by conceptualizing knowledge absorption as a collaborative, interorganizational endeavor, we extend the literature on absorptive capacity, thereby enabling its application to innovation-related contexts aside from R&D, to which it has traditionally been applied. Second, by focusing on social integration mechanisms as links between the capabilities, expertise, and knowledge of individuals, groups, and the organization as a whole, we heed calls to clarify the microfoundations of organizational capabilities. Third, although social integration is a multidimensional construct, few studies have addressed the influence of its individual dimensions. We outline how individual social integration dimensions exert differing influences on the individual knowledge absorption stages, thereby taking a first step toward unraveling the multidimensional nature of social integration and laying the foundation for future social integration research both in and beyond the absorptive capacity context.